Wanted to capture our earlier discussions about the meaning of freedom when we talked about free communities, free folks in the north and how we came with this representation of freedom. Freedom. The question of freedom and what does it mean. For today, we are going to be talking about what did freedom mean . In particular, what did it mean to the free people . In january of 1865, the secretary of war, Edward Stanton and general William Sherman had a meeting with 20 preachers in savannah, georgia. They were preachers, pastors, lay Church Leaders and they wanted to find out from these preachers basically what is it that the freed people wanted from freedom . What did they expect . And what did they expect in the aftermath of the emancipation proclamation . The group of 20 people who was ostensibly representative of freed black folks in the community selected garrison frazier, a 67yearold man to be the representative of the community. To speak for them. General sherman asked him what did he understand freedom to me especially in light of the emancipation proclamation . And he said taking us from under the yoke of bondage and placing us where we can reap the fruit of our labor, take care of us, and a cyst the government in maintaining our freedom. You can hear some of the language from the emancipation proclamation. Assisting the government in maintaining freedom. Having the people who were emancipated serving in the military, go to work and do that diligently. He is reflecting that. He is also reflecting the ability to reap the fruits of their labor so they get the benefit of their labor. The secretary and the general asked other questions likecould black people take care of themselves . Yes, they could. What did they need . Land. Did they want to live among white people . Some did but garrison fraser did not. In this discussion, we can start to see what freed people wanted from their lives even as they look at the governmental exploration for what freedom meant for freed people. They were already asserting what they wanted freedom to be. This is building on our conversations of freedom and freed black life and how precarious it was. We are moving into a moment into freedom meaning more. What could it mean . One of the other things that was connecting was the question of how do black people appear on the landscape of the United States . At the beginning of the term we talked about whether black people identity formation or was it something about pushing the nation to live out the true meaning of the crete. We are thinking about the question of whether or not freed people were pushing the meaning of what this nation was supposed to be and what its founding documents. In the process of doing that, we will start to see how it was that when people talk about emancipation and the moment of reconstruction, that sometimes the question is framed the way that sherman and stanton framed it which is basically is what can the freed people do for the country . And theres a question about what do the freed people want for themselves . And we look at reconstruction. A lot of times, what is it that freed people wanted for themselves it gets subsumed by the question of what can they do for the nation . I think we need to keep both of those questions and balance. Thinking about the relationship of their freed people to the nation but also and more prominently, what is it that free people wanted for themselves . One of the ways we will get at that is by thinking about these first places where freed people lived, where they went to. They were called contraband camps. We will spend the majority of our time looking at how freed people find freedom. I wanted to start out with some of what i call the first class of freed people. That is the black soldiers. When we think about black soldiers, many of them were freed black men that enlisted to support the union effort. Some of them were self emancipating men who liberated themselves from slavery and joined the union ranks. It was a real debate about whether or not enslaved men, or freed black men should support the war effort. You can think about reasons why. Think about their experience of africans in the American Revolution. What happened after the American Revolution . Did they realize the freedom that the American Revolution promised . No. That is why we had that graphic. They had freedom but it was not full or meaningful freedom or a complete freedom. There was a real debate about whether or not black men should support the war effort. Eventually they do and they enlist. They enlist after the emancipation proclamation because it becomes a war measure to enlist black men to support the union effort. They believe they can demonstrate their commitment to the union and the principals of the nation. And that would reflect well on african people. That they were participating in this process. Some refused to. Some refused to enlist and some were forced into the army even on the union side. It was not all soldiers that participated in the war, were ready to jump into the war effort. But many did. They made up 10 of the union army and 25 of the union navy. There was a significant buy in for black soldiers. They often did not get competent leadership because they were laboring under the systems of racism that kept them from getting their primary leaders. And they were sometimes denied the ability to hold commissioned positions as leaders. Eventually, they were allowed to gain some commissions. They have some leadership role. They were also often placed at the forefront. Sometimes called cannon fodder. Put on the frontlines of different battles. They suffered some of the greatest numbers of casualties. As a result of this service. One example of suffering casualties because of being placed on the front lines but also the tenor of the war was so charged that they would experience extreme violence because they were freed black men that they were viewed as being runaway slaves. Fort pillow in tennessee, there was a group of black soldiers. There is a massacre of union troops trying to surrender. Black soldiers were often on the front lines. That is what happened there in tennessee where they were held up in a fort. The Union Soldiers were trying to escape. When they tried to escape from the fort, they believed there was going to be a transport waiting for them. There was not. As they tried to escape and surrender, they were massacred and shot as they were fleeing from the fort. And a similar situation happened at the battle of the crater where there were a black soldiers on the front lines of the union effort. As they rushed in, they were blown up with mines. They were massacred as a confederate soldiers, they were screaming no quarter. They would not be allowed to surrender. The only end they could have would be death. We can see how black soldiers were leading the cause of the war by articulating how they could be supportive of the union. We can see how they were thinking through and struggling under some of the limitations including being denied pay. That happened early on. Some of them refused to be paid until they would get paid the same amount as white soldiers. Same compensation as far as wages as well as clothing and things like that. The other piece of what they did in terms of leadership in the war effort was in terms of helping secure freedoms for their families. I will talk in a minute about the contraband camps and how people were liberating themselves. But also what happened for the men that served in the military was that they were able to gain freedom for their wives and children. They were able to figure out that by serving in the union, they could gain freedom for their families and children. We also know that when it comes to pursuing freedom, it is not always sometimes it is viewed as an individual moment. People making choices for themselves. People also make choices for their families and communities. We start to think about some of the first freedoms. And the places where enslaved people started to find their first freedoms. It was and the contraband camps places where enslaved people ran to virginia minds when they heard that there was an army in the area. They knew they could find freedom there. They knew the significance of the war. This is significant. Sometimes people think people do not know what was going on. But they did. There was a black Communication Network sharing what was happening on so when the union came to the area, they knew what that meant. One of the first places of freedom was fort munro near hampton, virginia in 1861. We start to find that the first freedoms were from a political crisis and a humanitarian crisis. All at the hands of an slaved people liberating themselves. The second place is fort royal, South Carolina which was viewed as a rehearsal for reconstruction in these first moments of what the reconstruction process would look like. In 1861, in virginia, there were three enslaved men who ran from their person who was enslaving them. He was a colonel in the confederate army. They ran to where the union army had set up camp. They said they did not work anymore for the confederate colonel who was the enslaver. When they got there, virginia general Benjamin Butler had no plan for Something Like this. What would he do with these men that had liberated themselves from slavery . He figured out quickly how to handle the situation. He determined that these men should be treated like contraband. Contraband was an idea he pulled from International Law that said any goods being transported by a neutral party could be for the benefit of the army. And could be considered contraband. He decided he would deem these men as contraband. He also recognized relatively quickly that the idea of treating these human beings like property was not a workable idea. He also realized there was a conflict of what was the union going to do with these people now that they deemed them as property but they did not want to hold property. They did not want to hold these formerly enslaved people as property. In this moment, it starts to layout the landscape by which the union could start to think about these self emancipating men as potential laborers for the war and eventually as soldiers. That is what he did. He put the men to work in the union camps. A good workaround for the time being. They had to figure out what that would mean. Much later. What ends up happening is not only are men coming to the area and camps like that, but women are coming and children are coming as well as elderly people. It becomes a question what do we do with these people . He starts a work camp essentially. Under the union guard. And had these people work for the union he had women doing laundry and cooking and taking care of the elderly they brought with them. He did not see that he could let the families what else was he going to do with them . That started to push the Political Landscape of emancipation. In South Carolina, we can see how these contraband camps impact the social and cultural aspects of emancipation. You have union presence. Self emancipating enslaved people. But you have the influence of a religious community that starts to set up with a humanitarian crisis response. Resources for people that are emancipating themselves in South Carolina. They envisioned, the northern missionaries, they called themselves gideons. They were made up of missionaries from a variety of denominations including congregationalist and others congregationalists and others. They imagine themselves going down to teach formerly enslaved people how to become citizens. How to labor diligently. How to reproduce families that were moral. And how to create a religious community. They were shocked to find that there was already Robust Networks for education, for religion and churches that people were already taking care of their own spiritual lives. They were already pushing the landscape in terms of what it meant to be free for their families. Nevertheless, in this moment, they start to set up. So it looks like other elements of reconstruction. As established in some establishing the landscape for how the government would interact with these people. The freedmens bureau. In this first freedmen moment, you have contraband camps created by the impetus of freed people running to the union lines. Socially, culturally, what are we going to do . How do we sustain and support these communities . We are turning to look a little more deeply at the question of what did it mean to be free from the perspective of self emancipating folks . It is a robust landscape of information. What did it mean in terms of labor . In terms of their mental and intellectual pursuits . In terms of their personal goals for their families and themselves . Political goals in terms of government, Office Holding . The religious community. And even geography and movement . What did it mean to be free . We heard he heard from garrison fraser that what the freed people wanted was land and to be independent. They also wanted control of their labor. They wanted to get the fruits of their own labor. One of the ways we get a picture of what it is that freed people wanted was from the now famous letter of a formerly enslaved man named Jordan Anderson writing to his former enslaver about his response to his enslavers request that he returned to the plantation that he left from and return to work. One of the things that jordan he very memorably challenges the former enslaver about the way he treated him, the violence visited upon him and his family. And he says basically in dayton, ohio, he can work and get paid every week, his wife is able to be respected and called by her name as mrs. Anderson. He calculates how much money he would get in back pay if his former enslaver were to pay him the hourly wage he gets now for the years of service he had done without pay. If he would compensate mandate for her labor mandy for her labor as well. He estimated that the amount owed to them would be about 11, 680 in 19th century dollars. A significant amount. And he said if you are willing to pay me that and guarantee some other things, we will come back. He is having a moment of im not doing that. But letting his former enslaver no that this is what the wages are and i want to be compensated and respected for the work that i do. In another instance, in terms of labor and controlling labor and getting their fruits of their labor, there was an enslaved woman in georgia in the 1860s. She was so known for and disciplined for going and putting on her enslaving womans perfume and going into the vanity put on a little makeup and look at herself in the mirror and check out the side profile. She was disciplined for doing this. For her, that is what freedom was going to mean. To be able to do that and not be policed in that way. She might have responded after emancipation the way another enslaved woman did. She was disciplined for not responding appropriately and weekly enough. There is a sense of i want to control my labor and i am going to push back against those systems of disciplining black labor. Some people wanted not to labor at all. They did not want to have to work for anyone. They did not want anyone to control their labor. One way it manifested itself was not necessarily not to labor but to control the labor of the family whether it be children or wives who now wanted to stay at home or be kept at home. This idea of choosing not to labor was another choice. That they wanted. Or, to labor for themselves. To be able to gain the fruits of their labor from their own hands. And that meant or manifested itself because as garrison fraser pointed out and as we know, enslaved people were liberated without land. They had to secure land from the landowners and engage in sharecropping or they gained a portion of the crops. And profit from that or from having crop liens where they owned their own land. They would grow their own crops and have a portion of the crop they would have to give to the landowner or to the person assisting them. But all of this was not on the best terms for the formerly enslaved people. Harriet jacobs in the letter that we read today pointed this out. She said the freed men with few exceptions were cheated out of their crop of cotton. She said there was a system where people were being manipulated and not getting their full amounts. Lastly, they wanted land and they had good reason. They had good reason to want it and to believe that they would get it. General sherman, as part of the conversation he was having with the ministers of savannah was thinking about what to do with all of these freed people who had liberated themselves and the virginia army. Having all of these people falling behind because they realize the meaning of the armys presence and that they could liberate them. He figured he could take a swath of land on the eastern seaboard of georgia and South Carolina and promise to distribute some of the land to these self emancipating folks and freed people to labor on for themselves and take care of themselves. That is what would be needed in the very Agricultural Society at the time. And that is what people did. He apportioned some land. You could call them homesteads. They labored there. But that was not fulfilled. We will highlight the point in terms of the limitations of the friedman spirit and distributing the land. They wanted to control their own land, have respect for their labor. And take care of their families. What did it mean to be free in terms of mental and intellectual processes . This was one of the areas where the pursuit of literacy was robust. It was incredibly robust. Booker t. Washington described it as a whole nation trying to go to school. I imagine everybody trying to get into the schoolhouse to get an education to learn to read, to learn math, all of the elements of education afforded. Some of what emerges during this time from missionary and Common Schools in places like fort royal, a lot of the missionary set up schools but they also find there are already schools there. People like mary peek pictured here, in the corner, a freed black woman in hampton who has already been running a free school in hampton for freed black folks before the war. There is already an infrastructure for an education of a sort among freed lack folks to educate other black folks. That continues on during the period of emancipation. There are already places where people are creating schools right and then you have people like Charlotte Boyden and Harriet Jacobs who goes south to help establish schools and teaching them. Charlotte fortonyou will remember she is the daughter of james horton were, im sorry, the granddaughter of james horton who fought in the American Revolution from philadelphia. She goes down as part of gideon band to South Carolina and rights of her experiences with the freed children and she is shocked at the exuberant energy the students bring to the classrooms and the capacity they have. She is shocked because the discourse about enslaved people had been that they were not capable of learning or they were not willing to learn. They would have to be forced to work and learn. She finds that the kids are desiring to learn. They catch on really quick. She writes about how it is really a discredit to the people who have all the resources and the opportunity and then look down upon the enslaved people and the formerly enslaved people for their lack of education when the system was built to keep them uneducated. Not their lack of independent will. She is writing and reflecting that there is a robust engagement with education going on in these areas. Every time you find these moments where the expectations of what enslaved people wanted or what they were doing are being upturned and challenged. And you have these teachers and black administrators of schools and that is Something Else freed people wanted. They wanted their schools led by people that looked like them. People that understood their experiences. People that would not look down upon them or come with preconceived notions about their capacity. Instead, that they would reflect what their experience was. They knew they wanted education. They knew they were capable of doing this kind of work. They sought that. Which led to the formation of historically black colleges and universities. Rooted in emancipation. The language around education was around what kind of education freed black people needed. There was a model. Thinking of people arts with their hands or geography and all those other elements. And they also had institutions that become virginia unions, which is doma street from us. Places like the seminary down in petersburg, so there are all these places where formally enslaved people and self emancipated people are becoming educated. Part of the mission of the schools is the idea of educating with hands and hearts. What does that call to mind when you figure out educating heads, hands and hearts . What are they trying to do . So education could be getting people involved in the community. What else . Teaching them the tools of what they will need in the professional world. Ok, and a professional world. Anybody else . What educating head, hands and heart might mean . Is a kind of like teach one, teach one thing where you educate people and they go on to educate other people . Like each one, teach one. Using what you learn to teach other people. It was a little bit of all those things. Educating the heads. Having something in. Do you think or do you know if people converted to christianity because they were freed . Or what . Because before they were emancipated you said there was not a large amount of education was a process of manufacturing levers, who wants to work in a community, help the community to evolve, and again there was a sense of what education was for weather was for the job youre going to have down the road, and for what you can do to help other people to help the community and so in all those ways, its this false dichotomy of education and its a disruption in the way of the people who ran the schools, and they had to negotiate right. Sometimes they had to deal with funding issues, who is going to give the money if they were dealing with but certain education, and they had to have a story that would appease the, and have to have this Holistic Education as well. But pursuing literacy, pursuing education from people who were supportive of what their mission was. Than having education, that would help them and help the community at large. The what does it mean to be free. It was personal. It was personal freedom, its like whats my name. What i call myself. They change their names. We saw that with many people put, one who called herself harriott. Harry ross. They took off the names of their enslavers, and chose new names like freeman. Recognizing their new status. Change first names, they did not want to be called something, they changed to something they did want to be called. They change their names, to reflect their family groupings, and who they were akin to, and how they wanted to reflect their connection to their family members necessary and things like that. They also sought, security of the body against violence. Because security of the body, against policing that was happening in the community. Against violence and the aftermath of emancipation, there were riots. The so memphis has a riot. Of three days. Where the assailants were policemen and Small Business owners, and it killed about 48 black people, and 70 to 80 more were injured. And black women were raped, because of their connections to soldiers. This is in part a reflection of, how Southern Society and Southern Community were processing the presence of black men in uniform in the south. How they were reflecting, get the complete transformation of what Slave Society had been, so there is this riot where people are killed. And one of the things in one of the ways that people respond to this is by pushing back against this culture of the semblance that was put forth by an historian where. Women, black women in particular would not talk about certain aspects of their lives especially about sexuality, because it had been so far because their bodies, and their sexuality had been sewed based. So rather than talk about it publicly, they would not talk about it so they were being reflected upon in that way but in this instance, black woman testified to congressional committees, and we have some testimonies going on now, so you may have a sense of what it means, to testify in front of a big body of people who may or may not be supportive of the story youre trying to tell. And they told their stories they wanted their stories to be told, they wanted to have justice for the experience. So they had this culture of testimony as well, but telling stories, and telling what happened so that they could pursue their personal freedoms, and protection for their bodies, and their families in themselves. And also sort of recognizing, themselves and their own names, and who they want to be. They want to be known as. So what did it mean to be free . For what it meant, familial freedom. It meant that, having marriages recognized by the federal government, there were instances of mass weddings. So they talked earlier in the semester about how things were used as tools to discipline and disrupt the lives of enslaved people but emancipation its like, we can have our union formally recognized by the government. So they pursue that. What is interesting here is that, they pursued mass weddings, weddings recognition although this wasnt the only form of family and i want to acknowledge that, but they also had these ideas that final to have a missionary showing up, and it was a good example of a woman in South Carolina, who basically petitions to get her husband pay. He was a soldier in the army and this is 1861, and she is petitioning to get recognition, as his wife so she can also claim, his pay so she can support the family. This is before the federal government is recognizing family, and marriage and relationships so we can take from that, that its like they have their own idea of what it meant to be responsible to one another, and have relationships coveted relationships. And they lived them out through emancipation and they had their marriages recognized by the federal government. Reconnecting with family, was a key element of what it meant to be free. Some people traveled, hundreds of miles to try and find family members, or we connect with family members, pick and the placed ads in newspapers, to find their people and they placed ads in these newspapers, for decades. Up until the 20th century, people were still placing ads in newspapers. Saying, i am so in so, and i last saw my wife husband daughter or son or cousin, here and they were owned by soandso, and the last address they went to was this so all the information they could put in these ads to try to reconnect with their families. They did this again, philip until the turn of the 20th century to try and find their family members but they also suffered the time and distance, and not every story they were able to connect. And able to find their people. They also had, they extended kinship networks, they wanted to remain and strengthen. We found grandparents, for trying to take care of you know take care of their grandchildren, network of people who had been living together, not less airily married but not biological families, but they were trying to gain control, and support of children and other people. So they had these extended kinship networks. And they also had single thing headed household. Women were taken care of their children. This was under the challenge for free women, because the federal government didnt always recognize women as heads of households. So they had to navigate those elements. But they sometimes wanted that, and they used Court Resolutions basically and they wanted to force him to be separated and they wanted to access those resources and organize their families as they saw fit robust picture of what freedom meant. In terms of family it is reconnecting and also reconfiguring. Right . What did it mean to be free . It was political freedom, that we can see through places like that in national friedman convention, which we had talked about in the antebellum period, it started around the time of the colonization an immigration debate in the 18 thirties. These were friedman conventions in the 18 thirties, but during that emancipation period there is still having these meetings. Talking about what it means to be free, and what they are seeking. They talked about voting, serving on juries, colding offices, spaces where they started to crack out what freedom could mean. And they talked about constitutional conventions and participating in them because one of the things that happen as a result of the civil war and resolution was the reconstruction act that broke the south into military districts and made it so that the states had to rewrite their constitution to reflect the end of slavery and to grant suffrage to friedman. And these conventions they held office, black man were elected to hold office. In some places they are majorities of the conventions, like louisiana and South Carolina. And places like virginia they were not a majority but they participated actively about emancipation conversations. And they focused on education, race relations, they also talked about what it was that friedman wanted that didnt necessarily coincide with the legislative landscape of wielding and suffrage but. They also talked about issues around gender and sexuality, about interracial marriage. Many of them articulated the idea of trying to protect black women from being violated in we and raped or not having control of their bodies were being viewed in violent ways. What it meant to be free was a way to participate in the Political Landscape. To shape the definition of rights. What it meant to be feet free was religious. It meant exodus, it meant this idea of having an independent freedom but it also meant this moment of liberation that god brought about. Black folks who were christian, they believe this was a moment of god acting on their behalf, liberating them from slavery. Which is not to say that they are passively waiting for freedom, just that god was acting in their lives. That led to a surge of black folks being converted to christianity in the form of independent churches. We talked about even with the second awakening there was not this largescale conversion experience but by the time of emancipation, those numbers really start to climb. Independent churches. You find that there are hundreds of georges created during that emancipation, in the first five or ten years of emancipation. A lot of them are rule churches. And so, they created these independent churches, independent associations, independent nominations, there is a antebellum period that there is a church, but in the south you have the zion church. That is the First Independent southern, at least one of the first nominations. Before they were emancipated you said, there wasnt a large amount of slaves who were christian. Do you think that is because they were free and so they thought it as they had to convert . I dont know that they necessarily saw it, i havent seen documentation because god liberated us, liberated us as we are going to convert. But i definitely think that it was a good representation of what faith could do. For that reason, i also think it was in some ways of more practical element in people being able to move about and make terse choices of their own of where and how to worship. Some people had not been in a religious community at all. With the work of the independent association is to actually carry out mission work among black folks is probably a significant component. They said, we are the people that are qualified to help the free people. Who better than us . We know black people ourselves. We know what black people need so we should be able to carry out this work. I think all of those elements, both realizing that this is the moment of god acting and people seeing that. People having the opportunity to choose for themselves and responding to the work of the convention and churches. Theres this moment of what it means to be free. Independent religious worship. It also had implications for womens leadership and power. Something that we see and saw and one of the readings is how women were playing key roles in forming religious communities. So much so that some of the planters were complaining about one of the women and the Worship Services she was holding. There were women playing Important Roles in religious communities. That goes through some changes over emancipation. The media emancipation has women playing key roles. We see that in petersburg, virginia with the Saint Stephens episcopal church. Which is one of the first black episcopal churches in virginia. It is founded by a formerly enslaved black woman from north carolina. She works with one of the ministers there in st. Petersburg to start the church for formally enslaved black folks. Women are playing an Important Role in religious landscape of freedom. We have her reflecting the work of Women Convention of the Baptist Church that emerges at the end of the 19th century. Thinking of the question of what it meant to be free, geography and movement. Harriet jacobs said there is no more need of hiding places to conceal. She is referring to her own experience. Hiding in her grandmothers attic in the small crawlspace were she could barely stand. There is no more need for that. Now free people can go where they want. And many do. Many migrate to cities in search of their family members, in search of freedom to be able to move their bodies. Some of them stayed on the plantations where they have labored as enslaved people. Some are waiting out and figuring out what did it mean, this transformation of emancipation and waiting to see what would happen and then some of them started to move from the plantation. And for other what did freedom mean to the black individuals who were, i guess, homosexual . Folks that is such a good question, how are things reflected in the landscape of emancipation . That is an area of research where we talked about the issues around forced meeting among enslaved men. This is another one of those areas at the leading edge of scholarship or people are doing research to uncover the lives of folks in statement. There is a whole project. A few scholars are working on projects to uncover the stories. I think that is a scenario still unfolding. It is also the responsibilities. The landscape of freedom did not allow for Family Structures to be organized around same gender loving people. That said, there were lots of Family Structures that differed from that victorian model of heteronormative model of a father and mother and their biological children. Free people had a muriad of structures of families because slavery produce that in ways. They sometimes had units of women and children who live together and formed communities. They sometimes had singleparent households. That could be a father or mother and children. They are all different ways of forming family. Which is one of the ways you could see that. There was the institution that had the christian normative ideals about men and women and thats how it was structured. Even within that framework free people were disrupting what it meant to be families and be married. They had all kinds of ways to partnering. You had a partner today who is not your partner tomorrow are trying up relationships. There was a myriad of ways. There was a lot of ways we could start to look for what that experience may have been and try to uncover and read carefully and thoughtfully and asked the question. Thank you for the question. Thus the frontier of the research. Lastly you saw the return migration. Theyre returning to the places of enslavement as free people. Thats her we get a sense of Harriet Jacobs letter. She is saying, sitting here in my grandmothers house reflecting on what it means to be free and what it means to be free. She is writing about returning to a place where her family was buried. So many people fled and were able to emancipate themselves and they then came back to places where their families were buried. So places where they found their roots. In a lot of ways, this return to the places of emancipation, places of enslavement is how they made freedom meaningful and stayed safe by returning to those places to shape the landscape for freedom. The meaning of freedom, as you could see, was robust. Enslaved people and free people had a very robust sense of what it meant to be free and a lot of different ways of constructing it. But they laid the foundation for making a freedom meaningful. They laid the foundations and the conversations they had and the conversations between the former enslavers. They lay the foundations in their letters about the schools and in their pursuit of schools in the formation of schools. They lay the foundation for making freedom meaningful and so many ways through their activities and through their exchanges with various folks around that process. And in this moment we could say that emancipation marked new cultural moment. Religiously, socially, culturally, but there were things that were unimaginable at this moment that had been complicated in the antebellum time before the war. And so with freedom, with this idea of freedom, free people were able to go forward and start to create a new engagement with the institutions of this country in such a way that it puts a challenge and some of those frameworks and tries to reconfigure them. Which would be the next question to consider. Now we know what freedom meant, how did they make that freedom meaningful . That would be the next question to take up in our next session. I will leave it there for today. Unless there are questions. I can take questions if there are lingering questions. I believe i will leave it there for today and i will